TuneWiki review

Mary Branscombe

We review TuneWiki, an app that shows you the lyrics to your tunes as they're playing

Published on Aug 18, 2009

Did Jimi Hendrix really sing “Scuse me while I kiss this guy”? Was Bruce claiming “everybody's got a hungry horse”? Did Sting sing he wrote a note or broke a nose? If you’ve ever misheard a lyric or wondered what gobbledegook someone is singing (yes, Bell XI do sing about runways, rabbits and underwired bras in The Great Defector), TuneWiki is a great way of learning the words. It’s a media player that displays the lyrics on screen, in time with the music, and while it doesn’t have the lyrics for every song, it has enough to be worth using.

If that’s all you want from TuneWiki, you’ll be very happy with it - if you make allowances for the fact that while Tunewiki has licences to keep it legal so all lyrics are contributed by users, with either few or Too Many Capital Letters, and they don’t always synchronise perfectly with the vocals.

We’re also not that keen on not being able to tell TuneWiki where you keep your music (and it doesn’t find your tracks automatically). If it doesn’t offer to scan your handset for music, you’ll need to uninstall (or archive) it and re-install to force it to scan. If you add new music to your device, you have to quit and restart TuneWiki to get it to scan - and you have to deal with the scan dialog every time you open the app, which can get irritating (especially if you have a lot of tracks on a memory card).

Plus, the controls are a little basic; you can play a whole album or artist, or all your music, but if you want to pick and mix there’s no ‘add to queue’ and you can only add a song to a playlist if you're playing it.

But the TuneWiki team has bigger ambitions, and that’s where things aren’t quite as impressive. You don’t need to sign up if you just want lyrics, but to use the community features you have to set up and log in with a TuneWiki account. Like many apps that are available on various handsets, TuneWiki doesn’t let you do the things that make BlackBerry devices special, so you can’t use space to get the @ symbol when you're typing your email address.

You don’t get a lot when you do sign in. The ‘blipping’ feature for telling Twitter and Facebook friends what you’re playing doesn’t work on BlackBerry yet, and the maps showing who is playing what and where only show a proportion of users anyway. Choosing the Community option takes you to a mobile version of the TuneWiki site– but it also pauses your music, instead of leaving it playing in the background.

If you visit the site on a PC you can search for lyrics and hear the song (and sometimes see a video too). However, on the mobile site you can’t play the music so you only get the lyrics, along with charts of the most popular tracks and lists of what people near you are playing. You can search by title, artist or a phrase from the lyrics (like a manual version of Shazam); oddly, we found one track that had lyrics on the mobile site but not on the main Web site (One Night In Rio, by Louie Austin), and the encoding meant the BlackBerry showed apostrophes as a string of other symbols.

Currently the only difference between the free version of TuneWiki and the Pro release is that if you pay the £3.95 you won’t see any adverts; with the free version you lose the bottom line to a text ad that’s not particularly intrusive. Ignore the social network options until they do something useful, enjoy the lyrics and remember; Sweet dreams are made of cheese.